So I have an air-gapped network. We primarily use RHEL, sometimes CentOS. I'm building a utility "cloud" that needs to be able to kickstart from bare metal, as well as provision vms and kickstart them.
Cobbler (2.4.0) seems like a better choice for this than Spacewalk or RHN Satellite although they are all closely related.
It was easy enough to import the RHEL 6.4 DVD, and auto-create the repos. However, I need to add the yum virtualization groups, specifically: "Virtualization", "Virtualization Client", "Virtualization Platform", and "Virtualization Tools". These were not available on the DVD, so I actually setup an internet accessible version of RHEL6.4 and used yumdownloader to grab these groups and dependencies. It ended up being about 150 packages or so.
How can I manually add these packages (or any new packages) to the Cobbler RHEL6 repo so they are available for installation to new machines? If my cobbler machine could access the internet (which it cannot) I would just use cobbler reposync.
I guess I could make a "supplemental" repo folder and run createrepo in it, then cobbler reposync, but it seems like there should be a better way to just add the packages to the existing repo. The Cobbler docs are pretty vague on this point.
Any ideas? I guess that this will be a pretty frequent occurrence; that being we need packages we don't have, and we need to get them and deps and add them to the repo.
Best Answer
We don't use cobbler (we have a home gown system that covered multiple operating systems and setups) but the best solution Ive found is maintaining multiple independent repositories and pointing my config to.use all of them. Ssinve you're doing a partial sync of an existing repository that would.require a createreo on your packages to pull together the metadata.
When I was researching cobbler it sounded like this is supported.